Staff Analytics Engineer (Toronto, ON)

Company Description

This is a remote role, employees are welcome to work near any of our principal location hubs: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and the states of Texas, New York, Massachusetts or New Jersey.

SSENSE (pronounced [es-uhns]) is a global technology platform operating at the intersection of culture, community, and commerce. Headquartered in Montreal, it features a mix of established and emerging luxury brands across womenswear, menswear, kidswear, and Everything Else.

SSENSE has garnered critical acclaim as both an e-commerce engine and a producer of cultural content, generating an average of 100 million monthly page views. Approximately 80% of its audience is between the ages of 18 to 40. It is privately held and has achieved high double digit annual growth and profitability since its inception.

Job Description

SSENSE is looking for a Staff/Sr. Staff Analytics Engineer to join our rapidly growing Data Platform team. Staff at SSENSE are the models of technical and best practice within the department, they are accountable to provide technical leadership for multiple teams, and drive technical innovation across one or more competency areas. The Staff Analytics Engineer has an in-depth understanding of the product roadmaps, and crafts a technical roadmap to bring this to life, by working closely with the Director/VP, Product Managers and the Managers of Application Development. They will anticipate technical issues the squads may face and help developers come up with technical solutions to those issues. As a key contributor to the technical roadmap, the Staff Analytics Engineer will actively participate in shaping the architecture and technical direction across data engineering, analytics engineering, reporting & visualization. The ideal candidate will actively contribute to knowledge dissemination within the organization by coaching teams on best practices and processes, hosting knowledge sharing & training sessions, and publishing on the SSENSE technology blog. 

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Innovation and initiative delivery (50%)

  • Develop a deep understanding of the 1-3 year roadmap and capabilities in multiple teams, and drive the technical roadmap for Data platform, by partnering with Product, Engineering and Architecture leaders

  • Accelerate innovation by leading proof-of-concepts, rapid MVPs, and build/buy assessments 

  • Drive large, complex technical projects across multiple teams and be accountable for the implementation. This will span data engineering, analytics engineering, reporting and visualization, as it needs to cover the entire value chain from needs identification to value delivery for data and insights based decision making.

  • Write testable, efficient, secure and reusable code suitable for continuous integration and deployment, and that respects best practices and SSENSE development standards.

  • Be responsible for the quality, performance, reliability, scalability and resilience of all components owned by your teams through SLAs and monitoring

  • Validate that business requirements have been translated into a well-defined technical solution

  • Anticipate the technical challenges your will face when implementing the roadmap and guide the teams in overcoming those issues

• Architecture (20%)

  • Ensure soundness of technical design choices taken by the teams (scalability, resilience) you support

  • Coordinate actively with the solution architect to ensure appropriate level of validation

  • Contribute to the definition of standards across the department and ensure developers adhere to them

• Knowledge sharing, training and coaching (20%)

  • Raise the bar of professional software development - lead by example, and help others learn the craft through code reviews and coaching

  • Develop and deliver training sessions for Data teams and for the Business Intelligence Center of Excellence team members

  • Contribute content to SSENSE University, the internal peer learning platform, and other relevant documentation to train developers across the organization

• Recruiting and ambassadorship (10%)

  • Participate in recruiting events, helping identify and recruit top developers

  • Develop and enhance test material for technical aspects of interviews - live and take home

  • Conduct interviews, document outcome and help raise the bar for recruits we hire

  • Act as SSENSE ambassador in the developer community, representing the company in local meetups, conferences, contributing to open-source, publishing on the SSENSE tech blog, etc.

Qualifications

REQUIREMENTS

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, Master’s degree an asset

• A minimum of 10 years of software development experience

• A minimum of 10 years experience working with analytics and reporting tools

• A minimum of 5 years experience writing and optimizing SQL queries

• Deep understanding of database and analytical technologies in the industry including MPP and NoSQL databases, data warehouse design, BI reporting and dashboard development

• Demonstrated experience leading an analytics initiative that required effective collaboration across the organization and strategically thinking about business, product, and technical challenges

• Advanced knowledge of Python programming language, data manipulation and data visualization libraries

• Experience in one or more Data Lake table formats like Apache Hudi, Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake

• Hands-on experience in AWS services like Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon Redshift, NoSQL, S3, Tableau/Power BI, Athena

• Experience with data access and security techniques, both inside and outside of a data warehouse

• Experience creating data pipelines in support of near real-time event stream processing

• Experience in developing, implementing and maintaining complex data models for operational and analytical applications, both logical and physical

• Ability to work productively as a Contributor in any Data role, including Data Analysis, Data Engineering, and Reporting

• Understanding of Data Modeling, Data Quality, Metadata Management and other Data governance practices

• Recognized in the industry as a result of publications, seminars, presentations, or equivalent

SKILLS

• Highly analytical and detail oriented

• Ability to coach and mentor junior employees to achieve personal and professional goals

• Team player with a high sense of accountability and ownership

• Ability to influence and drive change

• Solution-oriented mindset and can-do attitude to overcome challenges

• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment and master frequently changing technologies and techniques

Additional Information

WORLD CLASS TECHNOLOGY 

Technology is at the core of everything we do at SSENSE. Driven by an engineering mindset and a problem-solving attitude, we blend fashion with technology to deliver an unparalleled experience to our customers as we build seamless, custom solutions to deliver the SSENSE offering. 

WORLD CLASS TEAM
The SSENSE tech team is responsible for an international headless commerce platform. Working in an agile environment, our squads are made up of experienced innovators in Product Management, QA, Design, DevOps, Software Development, Machine Learning, Data Engineering, and Security. Headquartered in Montreal, our technology organization has been growing at a rate of 2X year-over-year and is doubling once again in 2021 as we expand across Canada, US, and Europe.  

WORLD CLASS PLATFORM 

The SSENSE platform runs on Amazon Web Services making use of serverless microservices across web, mobile and app. Our event-source architecture already achieves over 10,000 requests / second and growing at an unmatched pace, currently unseen across the industry.  Our data-driven culture of innovation empowers every product team across the tech organization to explore building, testing and learning with the latest in Machine Learning techniques. Our automated continuous improvement DevOps model (making use of both blue / green and canary deployments) results in an average of 50 production releases every day.  

Read more about us on our SSENSE Tech Blog.